Re: polysynthetic languages

En réponse à Isidora Zamora :



>  Alternatively, are
>there any natural languages that fall below the morpheme-to-word ratio
>needed to be considered polysynthetic, rather than merely synthetic, that
>both mark the verb for both subject and object agreement and also mark
>nouns for case?
I'm not sure, but I'd think Basque (Euskara) falls in this category. The 
language is agglutinative, and it has case marking on the nouns (purely 
ergative, and with a lot of spatial cases and *two* different genitives :)) 
) and its verbs agree with the subject, the object and the beneficiary! 
(i.e. the nouns in the ergative, the absolutive and the dative). Note that 
an agreement affix for the beneficiary can be added to the verb even when 
there's no such beneficiary in the sentence. When it happens, the agreement 
affix is always second person, and indicates that the speaker wants to 
*include* somehow the listener in what he says. Spoken French has this 
feature too. Note that despite all that, Basque is quite rigidly SOV.

One of the coolest features of Euskara has to be overdeclination. In 
Basque, you can sometimes add a case suffix to a noun *already* declined! 
For instance, we have the case suffix -z for the instrumental case, and -ko 
for the locative genitive. With "urre": gold, you can make "urrez": "with 
gold" and finally "urrezko": "golden, made in gold", as in "urrezko 
erraztuna": "the golden ring, the ring made in gold". You can also add the 
article to a noun already in the genitive to form some derivations. For 
instance, with the possessive genitive in -en, you can, from "harotzaren 
etxea": "the blacksmith's house", create "harotzarena": "the one of the 
blacksmith", and even decline it again as in "harotzarenaren izena": "the 
name of the one of the blacksmith". The book I have about Basque mentions 
the *word* of a child to his mother who asked him who he was playing with: 
"ponetarekilakoarekin": "with the one with the beret", the only full word 
here being "ponet": "beret"! The interlinear of this word is:
ponet-a-(r)-ekil- a  -  ko    -a-(r)-ekin
beret-def. -com.-def.-loc.gen.-def. -com.

def.: definite article
com.: comitative case
loc.gen.: locative genitive
The r is in parentheses since it's there only because of hiatus between two 
vowels when adding affixes. And note that the comitative affix -ekin 
becomes -ekil- when followed by the article -a.

However, although this seems like quite a thing, I don't think it means 
Euskara is polysynthetic. Such constructions can contain only one lexical 
root, which quite limits them. You get one-word sentences only if your 
sentence would contain in English only one verb and a few personal 
pronouns, so that hardly counts (in fact, since Euskara's conjugations are 
mainly periphrastic - with auxiliaries -, most of its sentences contain at 
least two words, just for the conjugated verb :)) . And both words are 
stressed).

Christophe Grandsire.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang. 

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